Today I’m joined by Professor of Biology at Tufts University, Michael Levin. On the surface, Michael studies information processing inside biology, technology, and a combination of both, often with the goal of addressing health issues such as aging and cancer. But on a deeper level, Michael is a researcher whose name I hear whispered with a sort of reverence amongst the truly nerdy. And this seems to be because Michael is driving extremely cutting-edge work that either answers or completely upends some of the long-standing questions and assumptions that we’ve had about biology. One example is his creation of what are known as xenobots–living robots made from frog cells. Or perhaps most notably, his work with flat-worms that shows how information can be passed between generations of organisms without using DNA, leading to seemingly impossible feats such as growing a lineage of organisms with two heads. Much of this work can be found in numerous conversations Michael has had elsewhere, such as on TED or Lex Fridman’s podcast. So in this episode I try to dig much deeper into the underlying theory driving all of Michael’s work–focusing more heavily on how information and intelligence occur in reality. This leads to some truly remarkable revelations, including ideas that Michael has seemingly not talked about elsewhere–such as the idea of platonic forms and their influence on biological intelligence.
Find out more about Michael and his work at https://drmichaellevin.org/
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